Distributed Transactions in Vitess
With Vitess introducing sharding and allowing you to create cross-shard indexes, distributed transactions become unavoidable for certain workloads. Currently, Vitess only supports best-effort distributed transactions. So, it’s possible that a distributed commit only completes partially, leaving data in an inconsistent state.
At this point, 2 Phase Commit (2PC) is the only known protocol that allows you to give atomic guarantees for distributed transactions. For this protocol to work, a database must be able to support the ‘Prepare’ contract.